I've used QuarkXpress since it's inception. I find myself at the age of 47 looking for a new job.Quark has not appeared once in any list of required skills for hundreds of jobs.Is this it?Has Quark finally lost to InDesign?

Hi Kelvin,
What the marketshare of QuarkXpress is, is the best kept secret of the company. I don't think its much more then 5 to 15%. I suppose the users are mostly, like yourself and me, for many years, very loyal to the product. Althought there are some, amazing, startup problems with QuarkXpress v10, I still think its a great application for print design. The AppStudio part of it is also great to make digital magazines, as I experienced. These startup problems come at a time Quark could have made a major marketing effort to gain new customers. The Adobe subscription plans are of course horrible and probably introduced because of falling sales. So, yes, its a pitty the marketshare seems to be low. Not only for Quark, but also for its users, who are looking for a new job. Good luck to it.

Kelvin wrote:It would be great If Quark could assimilate the Markzware InDesign conversion extension Q2ID.
Then it would be a straight-forward choice of app interface.

Do you mean ID2Q? And if you do, that would be a big problem as Markwzware owns the rights to it and Q2ID.

Also, if ID2Q is anything like Q2ID then this is not straightforward. We switched to ID in 2011 and have been converting our old XPress documents wherever they come up. Invariably there is something amiss whenever we get the file in to ID.

Frames with borders not centered, images (particularly EPS images) that do not import and clipping paths that dissappear. One of my biggest headaches is that in QuarkXPress we used Alpha Channels for TIF images and InDesign much prefers Clipping Paths so any Alpha Channels we had often tend to be messed up.

But my biggest irritant is knowing that I created a box in XPress that has no content only to find out that InDesign has converted the box to an image frame!

I can't imagine that the ID2Q plugin would give an XPress user a perfectly converted document if the Q2ID plugin doesn't get it right for InDesign users.

I prefer to work in Quark but everyone I work with requires InDesign. Regardless of the extended capabilities of each application I find designers, publishers and subs are using them for almost identical core functions.

I haven't purchased the Markwzware converters as they are ridiculously expensive, I was also hoping for feedback like yours.

Kelvin wrote:I prefer to work in Quark but everyone I work with requires InDesign. Regardless of the extended capabilities of each application I find designers, publishers and subs are using them for almost identical core functions.

I haven't purchased the Markwzware converters as they are ridiculously expensive, I was also hoping for feedback like yours.

...so many thanks

I prefer to work in XPress as well. But my decision to switch was based solely on lack of experience with InDesign. If I ever need to I want to be able to confidently tell a prospective employer that I have experience in InDesign.

The best way for me to do that was to learn the program and I wasn't going to learn it without getting paid for it, so I switched us from XPress to InDesign here where I work. My boss doesn't care what I use as long as the work gets out and on time so now I'm getting paid work experience in the program.

I think the Markzware extensions are helpful if you don't have a copy of the other program. Even though they aren't perfect conversions, sometimes, they are better than starting a large document from scratch. But whenever I use them, I never wind up with a document that doesn't need a lot of clean-up.

We're using both programs now. I'm trying to break people from the mentality that it's an either/or proposition. For the newer people creating newer jobs, if they can get them done quickly in In-Design, let them. But for other larger projects that we invested lots of time and money into automating for Quark 9, I see no reason to reinvent the wheel. If a customer wants the same thing they did last year with just a few minor price changes, it's just not cost-effective to rebuild that job in InDesign just so everything can be uniformly designed in the same program.

If you plan to own both, why not use both? For years, we had some things done in Quark and others in Photoshop or Illustrator. Now, it's either in Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator and a few here and there in InDesign. There isn't as much crossover with people working on each other's projects as I think people expected there would be, so it works. But it is necessary for everyone to be at least a little familiar with all 4. Though, I can tell you right now, if you have a "hot" job that you need done right away, you're getting it in Quark because all the veterans here who work the fastest usually work the fastest in Quark.

But it is a reality in the industry that you have to learn whatever tools are trendy in order to stay marketable. It's not even just InDesign. "Designers" today are also expected to be web developers, mobile designers, programmers, Flichtcheckers, troubleshooters, video editors, photographers, writers, proof-readers, GUI and SEO experts, Tweeters, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. What's hysterical is that most job ads out there want to pay someone $12 an hour for all of that, which is insane. People don't understand how much mastery is involved in each of these areas and they assume someone can just pick it up quickly and be good at it. You would never go to a dentist and expect him to be able to perform heart surgery on you. But when it comes to designers, people will absolutely go to a print designer and expect him or her to design, write and program a successful website, and be willing to get paid in peanuts and Cheerios for it.